A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Just days after we rapped Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO) for claiming that “every economist from the far left to the far right was saying the government needs to step in because there was absolutely no private sector investment,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) tells the Washington Post,

You’re darn right I voted for the stimulus. Every economist, including [some] Republican economists … said, for God’s sake, don’t let it go off the cliff.

This is the myth that just won’t die. Markey and Connolly are echoing similar claims by President Obama, Vice President Biden, and even the notoriously unreliable Robert Reich. When Biden said it, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw asked if he was “disingenuous or misinformed” and pointed out:

When Robert Reich tried to claim that “economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama’s plan,” I pointed out that that claim depended on exactly two names and that the Washington Post had demonstrated that neither of them was in fact a Republican supporter of the $787 billion stimulus bill.

In fact, of course, hundreds of economists went on record against the stimulus bill. The Cato Institute’s full-page ad with their names appeared in all the nation’s major newspapers. The ad and the economists were featured on dozens of television programs.

Which brings us back to the question that Mankiw asked of Biden and that I asked of Markey. Is Representative Connolly really unaware that there was vigorous debate among economists about the so-called stimulus bill, and that hundreds of economists expressed their opposition in every major newspaper? Connolly has lived in Washington his entire adult life. He spent 19 years on a Senate committee staff. He served for 14 years on the Fairfax County Board. He worked as vice president at two large government contractors. Is it possible that he doesn’t read the Washington Post – or the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, or Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill? If so, then maybe he really believes that “every economist, including Republican economists” endorsed the stimulus. Someone should ask him: misinformed or disingenuous?

The new unemployment data have been released and they don’t paint a pretty picture – literally and figuratively.

The figure below is all we need to know about the success of President Obama’s big-government policies. The lower, solid line is from a White House report in early 2009 and it shows the level of unemployment the Administration said we would experience if the so-called stimulus was adopted. The darker dots show the actual monthly unemployment rate. At what point will the beltway politicians concede that making government bigger is not a recipe for prosperity?

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. The Obama White House imposed an $800-billion plus faux stimulus on the economy (actually more than $1 trillion if additional interest costs are included). They’ve also passed all sorts of additional legislation, most of which have been referred to as jobs bills. Yet the unemployment situation is stagnant and the economy is far weaker than is normally the case when pulling out of a downturn.

A Pew Hispanic Center report released today confirms what has been widely known, that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has dropped sharply since 2007. The real argument is over what’s behind the decline.

According to Pew’s Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, the annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants dropped by two-thirds during 2007-09 compared to 2000-05. That plunge has contributed to an overall decline in the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States from a peak of 12 million in March 2007 to 11.1 million in March 2009. Pew calls this “the first significant reversal in the growth of this population over the past two decades.”

Advocates of more restrictive immigration policies have been quick to credit increased enforcement for the decline, but that thesis doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. While enforcement efforts have indeed been ramped up in the past couple of years, the change has not been dramatic. Resources devoted to border and interior enforcement have been increasing pretty steadily since the early 1990s.

It seems implausible that more recent, incremental increases would have such a visible effect when years of increased enforcement efforts before now so visibly failed. In fact, the same restrictionists who constantly complain that nothing has been done to enforce our immigration laws are among those now praising that supposedly non-existent enforcement for the drop in illegal immigrants. They can’t have it both ways.

The more obvious explanation is the steep economic recession that began to bite in 2008. The downturn has been especially brutal in the housing and construction industries where many illegal immigrants found employment during the previous boom. As evidence, the decline in the number of illegal immigrants has been steepest in those states, such as Nevada, California, and Florida, where the housing downturn has been the most severe.

When the economy revives, I predict the inflow and population of illegal immigrants will begin expanding again, too. This problem will not be solved until Congress and the president work together to enact comprehensive immigration reform that widens opportunities for legal immigration.

I just want to add my two cents without belaboring any of Dan’s succinctly-made points. (Besides, I’ve harped on and on and on and on and on about the problem of trade reporting this year.) It’s a shame that so much time and energy has to be diverted to cleaning up messes left by reporters and editors, who should know better by now.

The bottom line is that neither imports nor trade deficits cause U.S. job loss or slower economic growth. If anything, the charts below (all compiled from BEA and BLS data) support the conclusion that imports and the trade deficit rise when the economy is growing and creating jobs, and they both fall when the economy is contracting and shedding jobs.

It has become conventional wisdom that a rising trade deficit is bad news for the economy. This week’s announcement of an expanding deficit in June prompted such headlines today as this one in the news pages of the Wall Street Journal: “Wider Trade Gap Signals Weak Growth.” As my colleague David Boaz blogged earlier today, the trade deficit is even blamed for daily swings in the stock market.

I’ve been studying and writing about the trade deficit for years, and devoted a whole chapter of my 2009 Cato book Mad about Trade to the subject, and I keep coming back to a basic question: If the trade deficit signals weak growth, why does the U.S. economy seem to perform so much better during periods when the trade deficit is growing, and so much worse when the trade deficit is shrinking?

Think back to the 1990s, the “goldilocks economy” when growth was strong, jobs plentiful, and inflation low. That was also a time of rising trade deficits. In fact, the trade gap grew for eight years in a row, rising from $77 billion in 1991 to $455 billion in 2000. In that same period, the unemployment rate dropped from 7.3 to 3.9 percent.

Again, in the middle of the George W. Bush presidency, the trade gap grew for five straight years, during a period when the economy expanded and the unemployment rate fell from 5.7 to 4.4 percent.

In contrast, the trade deficit invariably shrinks during periods of recession. The trade deficit fell by more than half from 2007 to 2009 as domestic demand and imports plunged and unemployment soared. Sagging domestic demand means fewer imports.

Of course, I’m not arguing that a bigger trade deficit stimulates the economy. I am arguing, contrary to the conventional wisdom reflected in this morning’s headlines, that an expanding trade deficit does not appear to be a drag on growth. In fact, the plain evidence is that an expanding trade deficit is more often than not a signal of stronger growth.

President Obama says he wants to “invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt.”

That’s a curious statement because the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the president’s current budget proposal projects that publicly held debt as a share of the economy would reach levels last seen at the end of the Second World War.

When the CBO’s numbers are plugged into a bar chart, the projected Obama debt levels (red bars) look like…the upward slope of a mountain (!):

To be fair, Obama’s predecessors – particularly the previous Bush administration – share in the responsibility for the mountainous rise in federal debt. However, that’s all the more reason for the Obama administration to work toward a peak instead of a steeper incline.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis latest release of industry compensation levels shows that the average federal worker ranks up at the top along with employees in the finance and energy industries. That’s not exactly popular company these days.

The BEA presents compensation data for 72 industries that span the U.S. economy. Figure 1 shows the 20 industries with the highest levels of average compensation, which includes wages and benefits. It also shows the average for all U.S. private industries and the average for the industry with the lowest compensation. (The names of the industries have been simplified in some cases).

Federal civilian workers have the sixth highest average compensation of the 72 industries:

As yesterday’s post showed, federal employee compensation has exploded over the course of the decade. Figure 2 shows that this federal employee compensation growth has been the fifth highest of the 72 industries measured by the BEA: